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Election Hopes – Quaint

I fear that all this optimism about the coming election shows a lack of understanding of what we’re dealing with. This optimism and faith in the electoral process seems to me to be, as our Attorney General said about the Geneva Conventions, “quaint.”
History doesn’t have very many examples of dishonest, corrupt, authoritarian, cultist regimes willingly handing over to others the power to remove them from office and jail them for their crimes.
Watch your backs!

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8 thoughts on “Election Hopes – Quaint”

Yes, I agree with your sentiment.
I mean, why isn’t President Bush in the least bit concerned about GOP fall prospects. Could it be he knows Republicans will once again steal elections where they control the voting machines?!?
I mean, there are upteen stories about soon-to-come Congressional hearings, impeachment, and so on, but Bush could care a less.
Why?!?

Many many Americans are in for a big surprise come the morning following the fall elections.
Large Democratic leads in the polls, including exit polls in so many pivitol races will disapear as the final numbers come rolling in.
Dave you are right: “History doesn’t have very many examples..”
They simply have too much at stake. They will not let the house or senate fall into Democratic hands.

After the past 3 elections it was shocking. It looked like we had won and then the margin slipped away. As time went on, more and more stories of bad electronic vote-counting equipment, disenfranchisement at the polls, voter registration rules that keep people of color from voting and VOILA! A pretty clearly sdtolen election and no one wants to rock the vote and contest it.
Very scary indeed. Not only do we need good candidates, a message, a GOTV effort, and a majority of voters – we need to fight hard for the right to vote and the right for our votes to be counted.
Or we lose again and again and again.

Well, if it wasn’t for the rigging, the extra-parliamentary funny business, the collapsing 4th Amendment, the secrecy and the war, we would certainly have them on the ropes. But I tell you, Dave, I’m really looking for the turning point now.
And you know I think I’ve found that turning point. I saw it on the BBC TV News, the story of Scott McClellan’s resignation. It was funny enough, the Press Conference on the Lawn, where Bush projected into his Golden Years, when he and Scotty would be sitting in rocking chairs, delighted to reminisce about all the “good times” they had in the old regime. That seemed hilarious enough.
But the real corker came when it was time for the President to dramatically fly Scotty Boy away in the Presidential Helicopter. The machine, as it turned out, had a major malfunction, and couldn’t get off the ground, couldn’t even start.
Well it just tickled me and still does, because it’s a metaphor, Scotty out of a job and grounded too. And the President is on video, emerging from the helicopter, chuckling, repeatedly and inanely shrugging his shoulders in his trademark fashion.
Well just throw it on the pile of metaphors with all the others, beside the pile of smoking guns. Even the theatre bits no longer function for Bush. His schtick is in a state of dysfunction. I think that the polls show that most Americans have put Bush and his Flying Machine of State in the loss column.
Of course, Dave, we still have to watch our backs; but these characters who have been in power so long are beginning to look pretty shakey to me. Our democracy may have been technically compromised and is still a daunting challenge to operate; but as the days pass and we get closer to November, I can’t help but think that Americans at large have rejected these leaders, and will not be changing their minds about them.

Ohio and Florida are permanently Republican now — their elections have been corrupted to complete one-sidedness.
Until the day everyone votes absentee or otherwise by hand, and the counting people are honest humans, it will continue that way.

The fun part, of course, is answering the charge that this kind of talk is nothing but wallowing in despair.
It isn’t despair. Once we no longer have to pretend that we have a functioning electoral system, we can get busy on the long road to restoring our lost democracy.
Despair would be observing that there is a very real chance that a clever simulation of democracy might be able to serve in the place of the real thing.